The News in the news

Once again, there’s a “new” The [Mexico City] News. The “old” News — founded in 1950 by Romulo O’Farrill — achieved something of legendary status given the later career of some of its former ink stained wretches like Pete Hammil and Joan Didion. And, provided a nice cover for a passel of spies back in the day.

Though widely suspected of being a mouthpiece for Washington (and supported by the C.I.A. — which is probably true for more than a few of its underpaid reporters and editors) — in the mid-1950s Fidel and Raul Castro (who were living around the corner from Novadades, the parent company) would come in to check the foreign wire service reports (then-editor James Plenn recalled them as “nice boys”).

Given both the CIA influence (which supplemented reporters’ incomes, while also providing “loans” to the paper, and even copy through a front organization, “Daniel James and Associates” a supposed public relations business), the O’Farrill family’s ties to the conservative wing of the PRI and the paper’s utter dependence on the Party for advertising revenue, it was — ironically enough — a victim of press liberalization in the 1990s.

The News hung on for a few years, Novades didn’t seem to know how to function in the new era, with papers (and all media) having to scramble for advertising revenue after access to government-sponsored advertising became competitive.

By 2002, when Novades itself folded, the News was a joke. It still had some good writers (I ran into Michael O’Boyle one night who said that the News was the only place a guy could be the business editor of the country’s largest English-language daily fresh out of journalism school) but there wasn’t much news in The News that I couldn’t get elsewhere. And I wasn’t the only one.

And, although there was an explosion in the English-speaking population of Mexico beginning in the late 1990s, the news-reading community changed. Those interested in “news from home” could access U.S., Canadian, British and other papers over the internet, or watch cable television. Most of the growth in monolingual English speakers was among retirees who had no interest in Mexican affairs, and the paper — if read at all — seemed to depend on ESL teachers: not exactly the best market for advertising new cars or sales at the local supermarket.

With English probably the second-most widely spoken language in Mexico, there is still a need for an English-language daily, and for a few years, the Miami Herald, in cooperation with El Universal, did publish “The Mexico City Herald” which just never really got off the ground and folded in 2005.

When the “new” The News was launched in October 2007 (I had a little warning from my own journalistic “deep throat” source), I was a little dubious about the O’Farrill family coming back into the news-biz, but the paper seemed to have decent funding — from somewhere. Never attracting any real ad revenue to speak of, its raison d’etre seems to have been a forum for attacks on the PRD-led Federal District Administration.  Still, it had some good reporters:  Jonathan Clark, who’d been one of the few “real” reporters at the end of the old News era was lured back from Arizona, David Agren, who’d been hanging on as a stringer for Canadian papers was brought on board, and Nacha Cattan did good local news stories.  Otherwise, it was a mixed bag (one reporter used to post messages on one of the tourist message boards looking for sources.  Jonathan Clark once wrote a good story he caught on to by reading the tourist websites — and that’s how I met  him — but it was about a foreigner who preyed on tourists, and tourist message boards were a legitimate reseach tool).

As a national daily, it had a huge problem —  Agren was expected to cover the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate and Los Pinos all on his own; what spotty coverage there was from outside the capital depended on free lancers (like myself on one occasion), or was re-hashes of foreign coverage … and filtered through the editorial presumptions of the foreign press.  When I visited The News in February, the staffers all mentioned the same problem — the paper depended on coverage from foreign (U.S.) news sources with their foreign biases or they were publishing news two or three days behind the Spanish-language papers.

I should have had a clue something was up when David Agren was forced out (ostensively because he wasn’t writing enough — though how one guy was supposed to do the job normally covered by at least a dozen writers is beyond me) I should have sensed something was up.  I wasn’t the only one to notice that last Friday’s on-line edition, and Saturday’s …. and Sunday’s were the same.  Looking at the print edition, there was an explanation that the paper was moving offices.  News, apparently, to the News.

And — the paper went out with a lie.  There was no move.  For that, we need to look at Planeta Mexico (a tourist website!) and Editor and Publisher (a U.S. publication for the news trade);

Mexico City News, the city’s only English-language daily, began operating under a new owner Monday — and with a new publishing schedule and with a staff shrunken by two-thirds.

Grupo Mac, whose Mexican papers include Cambio and Estadio, bought the paper from Victor Hugo O’Farill of the well-known Mexican publishing family.

In unsigned editorial in Monday’s paper [reprinted by Deborah Bonilla in the Los Angeles Times’  “La Plaza”] Mexico City News said it is reducing its page count to 24 pages Monday through Thursday and will publish a 32-page weekend edition on Fridays. It is eliminating its Saturday and Sunday editions.

Planeta Mexico reported the paper’s staff had been trimmed by two-thirds. The editorial alluded to the layoffs, saying the “fault” for that lies with the previous owner.

“When you lay off dozens of employees by surprise — as happened at The News on Friday, and as is to be expected in any merger, anywhere, particularly during an economic crisis — make a personal appearance to break the news,” the editorial said. “Have the ‘cojones’ to fire people yourself, thank them for their hard work and effort and face any possible backlash, rather than leaving the dirty work to the lackeys and muscle-for-hire.”

The firings were — at least in the letter of the law — probably (but not definitely) legal, but the “new” News doesn’t look any different from the old news… except that it doesn’t even have what news the other one did, relying instead (one hopes temporarily) on reprints from U.S. media sources.  And, still using the really crappy on-line service that not only replaces accent marks with gobbledy-gook — as commentator Charles Dews noted in the La Plaza story, “Can you imagine how frustrating it has been to try to read something like JosACe FernACandez from MichoacACan played fACutbol today in PACatzcuaro, and suchlike?”

They’ve got to do more… as it is, the Mex Files can screw up accent marks and run the news a few days late at a lot less money (which it can always use… more money, not less of it)… and at least you can access the archives.